With the growing demand of intelligent mobile devices for wireless fidelity (wifi), a technology relating to using a personal computer (PC) to share a network with an intelligent mobile device, i.e., a PC hotspot technology, has quickly emerged. This PC hotspot technology is to use a computing device that is connected to a network as a hotspot, and shares a wifi signal with an intelligent mobile device. In this way, an intelligent mobile device such as a mobile phone, a tablet, or other notebooks, can be connected to the network through the computing device, achieving simultaneous connections to the network, as shown in FIG. 1.
Network Address Translation (NAT) is the core of stability and compatibility of a device hotspot. Primarily, two solutions of implementing a NAT of a PC hotspot exist for a Windows platform.
One solution involves the use of a built-in component of a Windows system: Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). However, since the ICS component is not a core component of the Windows system and largely relies on other services of the system, deficiencies such as a high failure rate, poor stability, and difficulty in locating a problem that occurs, etc., exist in practical uses.
To solve the foregoing deficiencies of the ICS, another solution has been proposed, which involves using a development of a Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) for performing network address translation. Being an intermediate layer in the Windows system, the NDIS, however, is limited by a Windows system framework, and needs a protocol driver of the Windows system when processing data packets. Therefore, during an installation of an NDIS driver, the protocol driver of the Windows system may consider that a network adapter has failed and disrupt a network connection, thus affecting use by a user. In addition, the NDIS driver has a low success rate of installation, and is difficult to be uninstalled. As a kernel mode driver, the NDIS may cause a blue screen which results in a computing device crash if a BUG occurs.